Stupid enough to think that a new $1 trillion health-care entitlement is just the thing to restore the country to fiscal health.

Stupid enough not to know that almost every entitlement known to man has cost more than originally estimated, with a congressional committee in 1967 underestimating by a factor of ten Medicare’s cost by 1990.

Stupid enough not to realize that it is through budget trickery — the taxes begin immediately, the spending is put off for a few years — that the program in the House shows “only” a $239 billion deficit over the first ten years.

Stupid enough not to worry that Obama’s proposed superteam of technocrats operating outside normal political controls — the so-called Independent Medicare Advisory Council — will resort to rationing when costs continue to spiral upward.

Stupid enough to consider it wise to use several billion dollars in cuts from Medicare to create a new entitlement rather than to forestall Medicare’s own looming insolvency, currently projected for 2017.

Stupid enough not to notice that the “public option” was explicitly designed by the Left as a stealthy path to single-payer, even as liberals continue to talk and write about its ultimate purpose openly.

Stupid enough to believe that we’ll be able to keep our current health-care arrangements if we like them, even though the public option could throw tens of millions of people out of private insurance.

Stupid enough to trust the same people who came up with the public option as stealth single-payer to craft a co-op provision that isn’t a stealth public option.

Believe it or not, but Mr. Lowry goes on. The above is just a small sample of this magnificent rant against liberal elitism. Enjoy.

Mark Krikorian of Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has a post up, here, at National Review explaining how Obamacare - while not outright allowing coverage for illegal immigrants - has no real protection against illegal immigrants using a universal US healthcare system.

Jonah Goldberg's column titled "A Deck Stacked with Race Cards" is a terrific and devestating critque of the fallacy of Obama and his minions "transcending" race.

Jonah gives example after example with his trademark wit and grace.

Two weeks ago, town hallers were supposed to be members of the Brooks Brothers brigade, Astroturf division. Now they’re well-armed anti-government militias. At this rate, they’ll soon be android ninjas with laser vision. Wait, strike that. They’ll be really racist android ninjas with laser vision.

Suddenly, if conservatives want to transcend race, we have to agree to massive increases in the size of government and socialized medicine.

That’s not transcending race, it’s using Obama’s race to bully the opposition into acquiescence. Actually transcending race would require treating Obama like any other president. Which is pretty much exactly what conservatives have been doing. Seriously, if Hillary Clinton were president, would conservatives really be rolling over for the same health-care plan because she’s white?

Sure, racists don’t like Obama. (In less shocking news, bears continue to use our national forests as toilets.) But that doesn’t mean everyone who dislikes Obama is therefore a racist.

What’s dismaying is how the press and Democrats are so desperate to obscure this point. The only notable political violence at a town hall was against a black man, roughed up by pro-Obama toughs. The assault weapon lawfully carried to a demonstration was carried by a black man. That supposedly racist poster depicting Obama as the Joker? (An LA Weekly writer fumed, “The only thing missing is a noose.”) That was created by a Palestinian-American supporter of left-wing garden gnome Dennis Kucinich. Whoops!

(Jack Fowler's comment at the end of this NRO post made me laugh out loud. So I share it with you.)

Out today: “A new Gallup Poll finds that 68% of Americans believe their federal income taxes will be higher by the time Barack Obama's first term as president ends. This includes 35% who say their taxes will be ‘a lot higher.’ ” The survey does report 9% of Americans think they will get a tax cut (yes, the from the forthcoming pet-unicorn deduction!).

British Conservative party leader David Cameron has issued some very strong statements on the Scottish government's release of the Lockerbie bomber. You can see him calling the decision "nonsensical" here and read his letter to the prime minister here. The fact that Miliband has been so mealey-mouthed and Brown utterly silent shows how pathetic Her Majesty's Government is at the moment. Their attack on Daniel Hannan as "unpatriotic" for warning Americans against a British-style health-care system showed the truth of Dr. Johnson's adage. But now they meekly allow a convicted enemy of the British people to go home; these scoundrels don't even have patriotism to turn to any more.

President Obama needs to clear the air. As a former law professor who specialized in voting rights, he is aware of how important even-handed application of the law is to election integrity. In 2007, then-Sen. Obama introduced a bill to protect Americans from tactics that intimidate voters. It also increased the criminal penalty for voter intimidation to five years in prison from one year.

"There is no place for politics in this debate," he testified before Mr. Conyers's committee in March, 2007. "Both parties at different periods in our history have been guilty in different regions of preventing people from voting for a tactical advantage. We should be beyond that."

One way to get there is for Mr. Obama to insist his Justice Department reinstate the Black Panther case or provide a full explanation for why it was dropped.

I was born and Boston and raised liberal. The Kennedys were sacrosanct (although when I told my mother about the Dead Kennedy band she did laugh).

So the realization that the Kennedy clan are so corrupt and that Ted Kennedy has been a sleazeball for decades was slow to dawn on me. This below from an editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled, "What Ted Kennedy Wants." seems to be yet another example of why the Kennedy myth should die.

What Mr. Kennedy doesn't volunteer is that he orchestrated the 2004 succession law revision that now requires a special election, and for similarly partisan reasons. John Kerry, the other Senator from the state, was running for President in 2004, and Mr. Kennedy wanted the law changed so the Republican Governor at the time, Mitt Romney, could not name Mr. Kerry's replacement. "Prodded by a personal appeal from Senator Edward M. Kennedy," reported the Boston Globe in 2004, "Democratic legislative leaders have agreed to take up a stalled bill creating a special election process to replace U.S. Senator John F. Kerry if he wins the presidency." Now that the state has a Democratic Governor, Mr. Kennedy wants to revert to gubernatorial appointments.

The man has a brain tumor but refuses to unclench his grip on power despite being a top SenateCrypt-Keeper to the tune of 47 years? Revolting.

WASHINGTON – Outside the Veterans Affairs Department, severely wounded veterans have faced financial hardship waiting for their first disability payment. Inside, money has been flowing in the form of $24 million in bonuses.

In scathing reports this week, the VA's inspector general said thousands of technology office employees at the VA received the bonuses over a two-year period, some under questionable circumstances. It also detailed abuses ranging from nepotism to an inappropriate relationship between two VA employees.

The above is from an AP report on YahooNews titled, "As vets await checks, VA workers get $24M bonuses." I wonder if Obama is going to fire this IG? Let's face it, scandals like this don't inspire confidence in creating even larger government-run healthcare programs.

The government has had its chance to run healthcare for our Veterns, our elderly, and our poorest of poor and has done a DISMAL job with all three. Why on earth should we trust them with the healthcare for all Americans when they've had decades to practice with these three groups and failed, failed, failed?

This Wall Street Journal op-ed explains, "Health 'Co-ops' Are Government Care, The Democrats' latest proposal bears no resemblance to the voluntary organizations that are known as cooperatives." 'Death panels' in sheep's clothing?

Michelle Malkin's anti-corruption crusade continues as she describes how only the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that are NOT lining Team Obama's pockets are bad in this New York Post article titled, "CORPORATE SHILLS FOR 'CHANGE'"

Heather Richardson Higgins is calling for "No Compromise on Health 'Reform,' Why the GOP should resist all entreaties to be 'bipartisan.'" in this Wall Street Journal op-ed. Let's face it, compromise on crap is still crap.

From The Washington Examiner, "Heather Heidelbaugh: Obama is governing as a community organizer." She closes with an observation that should have been obvious to all MSM journalists, "Despite the smooth talk and charisma, Obama adopted the beliefs and tactics of the organization he helped grow into a mighty tree. You want to understand the real Obama? Understand ACORN." Duh.

"How Obama miscalculated on health care." is the title from this Fortune Magazine article reviewing the political decisions Obama will face in the fall - "Obama is trying to walk a tightrope on this question, but the rope is really too thin to walk."

Want a preview of ObamaCare in action? Sneak a look at what has happened in Maine. In 2003, the state to great fanfare enacted its own version of universal health care. Democratic Governor John Baldacci signed the plan into law with a bevy of familiar promises. By 2009, it would cover all of Maine's approximately 128,000 uninsured citizens. System-wide controls on hospital and physician costs would hold down insurance premiums. There would be no tax increases. The program was going to provide insurance for everyone and save businesses and patients money at the same time.

After five years, fiscal realities as brutal as the waves that crash along Maine's famous coastline have hit the insurance plan. The system that was supposed to save money has cost taxpayers $155 million and is still rising.

Below is a speech from one of my husband's co-workers at BureauCrash. His website is here. BureauCrash's website is here.

Watch the video, it's worth it for some terrific perspectives on what we Tea Party Protestors are fighting for. I particularly liked this point of view:"The government has stolen our loaf of bread and taxed us for the crumbs." Sweet!

What did these "humanitarians" expect? That by releasing the first major (successful) airline bomber, the Libyans would be all respectful and quiet? They won, you lost by letting that murderer go.

"The sight of a mass murderer getting a hero's welcome in Tripoli is deeply upsetting, deeply distressing, above all for the 270 families who grieve every day for the loss of their loved ones 21 years ago," British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told BBC Radio.

It is "deeply distressing" for a lot freakin' more than those poor families, Miliband! When I first heard the British government was letting this man free, my thoughts were in this order:

3) This is only going to encourage the other terrorists because even letting the man go after 20 years in prison looks weak to terrorists who think nothing of beheading a person because they are a homosexual or a woman.

And what is with that, by the way? Why do Liberals believe that Conservatives hate gays and women when it is the Conservatives who believe we should fight the terrorists/Islamo-Fascist who think all Westerners are "pig dogs" because we tolerate/accept homosexuals and women rights?

It's like hating a soldier who is fighting for freedom. Your freedom. Islamic homosexual's freedom to exist. A woman's right not to have her genitals sliced off. You know, fighting for little freedoms like that.

So the socialist elite of Great Britain decide to be "humanitarian" and then wring their hands when the terrorists celebrate their weakness. The man deserved to be put to death 20 years ago for the murder of 270 men, woman, and children.

It's too late to be "deeply distressed", now you're gonna have to brace for impact.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

For those who believe they can support Obama's policies (cap and trade, Obamacare, etc., etc.) let me ask you this, are you comfortable?

By which I mean, are you comfortable with your present level of income and will you be happy staying at that level for the rest of your lives?

Because, and Europe has example after example, if Obama's frankly socialist policies are introduced in this country, you had better be certain you are comfortable where you are now because you ain't going anywhere else.

For every time you get a salary raise, you will pay more in taxes. For every "free" government service you receive, you will lose more of your paycheck. You can not rise unless you do extraordinarily well - a hundred times better than you are doing now - because as your income rises gradually so will your tax rate.

You will be shackled to the government for the rest of your life while your children and grandchildren pay for the conception to grave debt you placed on their shoulders.

The lush vegetation at our favorite place on earth - FDR Pebbles in Jamaica - inspired a new hobby, photographing flowers. FDR Pebbles is an all-inclusive resort that includes a Vacation Nanny who is assigned to your family and helps you as much or as little as you want during your stay.

I swear to goodness the first time read the words Vacation Nanny, my mouth watered.

The resort if owned by a Jamacian, employees locals, is green certified, small but very high service, and VERY affordable. Check out tripadvisor.com for reviews.

Let me put it to you this way. We have free places to stay all over the world from beach houses in Virginia Beach, an island in Boston Harbour, and Grand Cayman island to various places in England, France, Germany, Australia, Bejing, and Ecuador. But we choose to PAY to stay at FDR Pebbles because of our nanny Ty Cia. We've gone three times in the past four years and have no plans to go anywhere else until the children are too old for Ty.

You can go to my facebook page and look at myphotoalbums of our visit. Below are a few select flower pictures.

Drove 1/2 an hour out of my way home after my son's Occupational Therapy session in order to support Whole Foods and its CEO.

Went in for a gallon of milk and came out with $35 worth of goodies- I mean groceries.

Still won't let my children even touch organic produce, we did buy some lemon wafer cookies that looked good even though they were labelled organic. But that's another post.

I'd forgotten about the many good things at Whole Foods (for an active anti-organic person like myself, that is a very generous statement). I may try to get up there again the closest thing to Whole Foods we have in our area is a Wegman's.

Now, Wegman's I love (although they do hawk a lot of organic crap too, at least it's not their reason for existance).

Looks like Obamacare is causing The Wall Street Journal to write articles titled "Post-Partisan Promise Fizzles." I know it comes as no surprise to the good folks at WSJ but only idiots could truly believe Obama was ever post-partisan. Sorry but the truth was out there.

Another big DUH article. This time from the Washington Examiner titled "Questions of competence begin to dog Obama." I feel like this is another 'no **** Sherlock' moment. Seriously. Didn't anyone review the man's resume. Zero experience. None. Not in running a company. Not in politics. Zilch. The man did academia, "community organizing", "wrote", and did two short stints in political office. When has he ever demonstrated real, hardcore competence? If he was white, he would NEVER have gotten away with that political campaign because the newspapers would NEVER have colluded as blatantly as the did. Ugh!

Here is a report on the Pete Sessions townhall. Keep up the Good Work, folks!

The network failed to mention anything about Singer's extremely controversial background as a euthanasia advocate who defines "person" in such a way as to exclude newborn infants and others -- such as elderly dementia patients -- who lack self-awareness and the ability to make plans. The network promised a response to The Examiner''s inquiries, but finally offered a "no comment" this afternoon.

"Killing a defective infant," Singer has written, "is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all."

Singer once wrote he valued the life of an ant above his own daughter's in a New York Times op-ed a few years back.

I'm all for free speech but condoning these ethics is morally repugnant. The man should be ostracized, not placed on CNN. Disgusting.

An interesting Washington Post op-ed here suggesting that perhaps, just perhaps, we should listen to people like Dr. Denis Cortese, the chief executive of the Mayo Clinic.

The Democrats want to "go it alone" on Obamacare. Here's what the Wall Street Journal has to say about that.

So let's see if we have this straight: Democrats sought to go to war with one-sixth of the U.S. economy. They didn't have a plan, and now they have no allies, so they've decided to go it alone.

"Obama tries to reunite Democrats on health reform" according to this piece in The Washington Examiner. The problem is, at the end of the day, these politicians DO NOT answer to Obama. These politicians DO NOT answer to the Democratic Party. These politicians DO answer to their constituents. And woe betide any politician who forgets that these days.

Daniel Henninger suggests in this Wall Street Journal column that "In Government We Trust?, The public's reaction to government health care is proving that Ronald Reagan was right." I'd suggest that the public has always known what Reagan knew but until recently never believed they had to spell it out to their politicians.

In this New York Post article titled, "Bait and Switch" the opening paragraph says it all.

Obama has stopped talking about "health-care reform." The new poll-tested phrase of the day is "health-insurance reform."

Basically, Obama needs a scapegoat and thinks Americans are stupid enough to think that healthcare reform and health insurance reform are two different things. Many Americans may have a love-hate relationship with their insurance company (I know I do) but we're not stupid. The healthcare insurance relationship is a triangle between the patient, the doctor, and the insurance company. Obama has tried to bait and switch by shifting from attacking the doctor-patient relationship to attacking the patient-insurance company relationship. We are not stupid, Obama. We see through you - this still leads to Obamacare/nationalized healthcare HELL.

Dear Kristen,More than ever before, we need your help. On September 12th, 2009, NTU is co-organizing what we hope will be the largest demonstration that Washington, DC has seen in a long time: the 9/12 March on Washington! We need you to be there, and add your voice to thousands of others fighting to turn our government around.

You've been hearing a lot of bad news recently: a $1 trillion government takeover of health care, a $2 trillion national energy tax disguised as "cap-and-trade," a $787 billion so-called "stimulus" package, a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, a Congress that drafts 1,500-page bills nobody has the time to read. The list goes on and on.

But there's good news as well: taxpayers all across the country are standing up and pushing back against this unprecedented expansion in the size and scope of the federal government! You've seen people rallying at Tea Parties and asking tough questions at Congressional town hall meetings on TV. Maybe you've even been to a few yourself. Now it's time to bring the Tea Party movement to Washington, DC!

If you want to visit the nation's capital and raise your voice in support of limited government, please join NTU and thousands of Americans just like you at the 9/12 March on Washington! There are events all weekend, culminating in a march down Pennsylvania Avenue to our big rally on the West Front of the United States Capitol Building. Thousands of people have already signed up, the event is completely free, and it will send a clear and unmistakable message to our politicians: STOP! Stop spending money we don't have, stop raising our taxes, and stop making our mammoth government even bigger!

If you're frustrated about the direction politicians are taking, then please join us on 9/12! We'll need every person we can muster to help turn things around. Please visit the 9/12 website for details -- see you there!Sincerely,Your NTU Grassroots Action TeamP.S. -- Whether you can attend or not, please pass this message on to everyone you know. Thank you!

Tim Pawlenty - absent some Mark Sanford meltdown - could be the person to watch over the next few years. He and Sarah Palin could be interesting (and excellent) bookends to a GOP resurgence.

But if Republicans and conservatives are ever going to get off the ground, it's not going to be via listening to the useful idiots in conservative ranks who thought Obama was a good idea.

No, it will be listening to the Common Sense of The People who, in true conservative fashion, face the tasks at hand, use what works, and build upon that. Those who get too enamoured of the intellectual/academic/cocktail-circuit life are the ones who end up losing touch with reality.

I'm not for rule-of-mob but I do think that failing to listen to ideas because they come from a "person" rather than an "academic" is a failure of imagination, courtesy, and intelligence.

Still, there are warning signs in the same poll for Steinhauser. Shouting down supporters of the plan was viewed by a majority of Democrats, Republicans and Independents in the Gallup poll as an “abuse” of democracy.

The backlash against the confrontational antics of some of the plans opponents at the town hall meetings could be a pivot point for the White House.

Lucas was stunned when she attended the first town hall of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and saw it devolve into shouts, boos and confrontational questions. “It was not a discussion. They made sure an honest debate did not take place,” Lucas recalled. “I knew we had a task in front of us.”

The above quote is from this YahooNews/Politico post here and it has made me see red.

It occurs to me that the supporters of Obamacare as so quick to paint opponents as angry not only because they have NO response to the opponents legitimate questions but also because, well, we are righteously angry.

Unlike the knee-jerk hatred the liberals so often manifest in the face of the slightest, mildest disagreement, conservatives tend to listen to the opposing point of view and then respond. Differing with a conservative is having a real debate. Differing with a liberal is risking a foam-specked person screaming in your face.

But when legitimate constituents go to a townhall, ask legitimate questions, express legitimate concern about Obamacare, and receive snide, arrogant, dismissive answers hawking tired troupes and outright lies, then the opponents of Obamacare get righteously angry.

I watch the videos and I can see the crowds thinking, 'hey, that was a qood questions. Why is this joker not answering it? Why is he being so snide? Isn't he supposed to be working for me?'

Politicians in America work for The People - as in We, The People. It's easy to start thinking of The People as if they were some non-corporeal entity. In the same way, Liberals blame "Wall Street" or the "Insurance Industry" as if it was a separate thing rather than a collection of people, human beings.

In America, The People believe they are in charge. We can vote the bums out. Many of the Congressional Crypt-Keepers have forgotten that. And they should be voted out for doing so.

I tell my children all the time, people shout when they believe they are not being heard. The "Angry Mobs" are shouting not because they want to be disruptive or rude. They are shouting because the man or woman at the podium is not listening, is not answering their questions, and is treating them with an arrogant dismissiveness which I promise you will be returned in kind come Election Day.

So commentators and liberals, please note this is righteous anger. Not liberal anger for liberal sake. Opponents of Obamacare are correct to be angry about their treatment by the press and their politicians. And they will be right to do something about it when before the ballot box.

A pamplet that I believe got killed under President Bush but is being resurrected by Obama about your "choices". Given the author, it's not a happy read but a horrible glimpse of our future if Obamacare survives.

'PAY Czar' Kenneth Feinberg's official government title is "special master for compensation." You'll be happy to know that he's really getting into the confiscatory spirit of his role. Asked by Reuters if his powers include reaching back and revoking bonuses awarded to financial-industry executives before his office was created this year, Feinberg asserted broad and binding authorities -- including the ability to "claw back" money already paid out.

"ObamaCare Is All About Rationing" is the title of this Wall Street Journal op-ed by Martin Feldstein. Sure the your personal pocketbook will act as a "rationing agent" on your ability to go to get expensive eyeglass frames or afford plastic surgery. But do you want the government to be the rationing agent for ALL your healthcare?

Newt has something to say about the end of our lives over at HumanEvents.com titled "Keeping End-of-Life Decisions, Our Decision"By the way, could you imagine the movie Steel Magnolias but instead of it being a family decision to end Julia Robert's character, they had to put in a scene of the husband and family in front of a government ethics panel?

If Axelrod has been negotiating any part of any deal involving any of these players which are funneling money to the firm that owes him money, or if he is advising the president on the deals with any of these groups, that's a conflict of interest. Laundering the money through a "coalition" doesn't remove the conflict much less the appearance of impropriety. The coalition is in effect partially funding David Axelrod's severance package though its members might have done so unknowingly.

That's a very serious allegation being made over at Townhall.com by Hugh Hewitt here. As Mr. Hewitt says, this "conflict of interest" (if true) is far more significant than any Cheney-Halliburton connection. YIKES!

"Democratic investigators target health insurers" is an article from Politico.com, here.Is it just me or does Waxman's nose look positively rat-like?

Letters sent to 52 insurance companies by Democratic leaders demand extensive documents for an examination of ‘extensive compensation and other business practices in the health insurance industry.” The letters set a deadline of Sept. 14 for the documents. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, signed the three-page letter dated Monday.

An industry source replied when asked for comment: “This is nothing more than a taxpayer-funded fishing expedition designed to silence health plans."

These are private companies that Waxman is trying to bully. If this behavior is not challenged and destroyed, these illiberal liberals will not hesitate to demand this kind of information from any and all businesses operating in the United States. How would your business fare under such scrutiny? And remember, your doctor, your dentist, your therapists could all be next because they are all small business owners.

As Mark Steyn said over at NRO about the above, "You first. How come the compensations and perks of a vice-president in a private company are to be subject to greater public forensic examination than those of Dodd or Rangel?

They're supposed to be representatives not rulers. George III couldn't have got away with a letter like that."

"August Anniversaries Fans of government-run health care seem eager to forget the French heatwave of 2003." is the title and subtitle of this little slice of history and EU-style government-run hell.

The great Thomas Sowell has a post up at NRO here discussing who decides, ie do doctors or beaurocrats get to make decisions about YOUR healthcare.

His angle is that no one is saying "death panels" but he clearly proves that Obama's selection of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is damning.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is “Special Advisor for Health Policy” for the Obama administration. That’s nowhere? He is also co-author of an article on Americans’ “over-utilization” of medical care in the June 18, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Is that nowhere?

Dr. Emanuel’s article points out that Americans do not visit doctors or go into hospitals more than people in other industrialized countries. In fact, we go to both places less often than people do in those other countries, which include countries with government-controlled medical care.

I should explain that the phrase "over-utilization" is Dr. Emanuel's jargon for "reducing healthcare services for those whom I decide do not need it". Don't believe me, read the doctor's publications.

I love the title of this video, "Loose Tweets Sink Fleets" here. Yes it is 11 minutes long but it is worth listening too. If only for the reference to Joss's Serenity movie which they get slightly wrong. The anchor says "the signal will always get out" but the correct version is "Can't stop the signal." Either way, it's true.

As I have pointed out previously here, The Gormogons are doing an excellent page by page review of HR 3200 aka Obamacare.

Here is their review of pages 401 - 500. The summary of this section is as follows:

At this point, we are clearly seeing patterns. Various, established programs are being ripped apart to include more services, but lack explanations as to how these services will reduce costs or reduce the number of Americans without healthcare. This just reeks of window dressing, with details grabbed from wherever they could find them.

This should please the SEIU, because there is a lot about protecting the interests of workers at these facilities from management. Indeed, a massive amount of these pages cover filing grievances, protection against whistleblowers and management retaliation...almost as if the SEIU wrote it from one of their standard skilled nursing home labor contracts. That, my friends, is a hint.

Investor's Business Daily has an editorial up about NY Gov. Patterson's call for creating more "frack jobs" by frack drilling the oil shale in New York state.

What did you think I meant.

Suffice it to say, the article, here, ends with "Drill, Patterson, drill." a sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with.

Still you gotta love quotes like this...

Kennedy and the rest of the fracking opposition say that since the technique uses a lot of water, we should worry about possible groundwater pollution and the impact on water supplies, rivers and streams. Proximity of the Marcellus formation to New York City's watershed has caused concern.

Roger Willis, owner of a hydraulic fracturing company in the Pennsylvania town of Meadville, says thousands of frack jobs have been done on rock formations above and below the Marcellus shale in New York state with no aquifer damage.

The new fracking technology allows access to deeper, denser shale. "These are surgical operations utilizing the most advanced drilling technology known to man," Tom Price, senior vice president of Chesapeake Energy, told lawmakers at a recent hearing in Albany.

You know it is a smackdown when it starts, "Appeasement rarely works as conflict resolution strategy." And continues with Boehner explaining exactly how PhRMA's "backroom deal" with Obama was a selling-out of the American people.

Richard Oshen has spent the past four years making a documentary about the California Coastal Commission (CCC), a state agency too obscure to have gathered any previous documentarian's attention. It is, however, well known enough in the world of land-use policy to have been called, in a 2008 New York Times story, "the most formidable player of all" when it comes to land use decisions in California.

As Oshen learned, the CCC's powers extend far beyond what anyone would reasonably think of as either land use or the protection of California's coast. Coastal protection was the ostensible reason a four-year "Coastal Commission" was first invented for California after 1972's Proposition 20. The CCC was given permanent life by the California Coastal Act of 1976. Its current executive director, Peter Douglas, who is now serving his 29th year, helped agitate for and then draft the very statewide proposition that gave him his job.

The above are the first two paragraphs of this Reason.com article here detailing the scumbag tactics of the CCC and why we should all support Mr. Oshen's project to beam sunlight into this nest of vipers.

The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.

African-American man protests Obamacare here and here by carrying an assault rifle to protests and its perfectly legal. God Bless that man!

UK's Daily Mail is reporting, "Woman gives birth on pavement 'after being refused ambulance'" - a related story is an op-ed about an American woman who was in labor, showed up at an NHS hospital and was chastised for not bringing her own linens, pads, and other "birthing supplies." Think of this as a real-world glimpse of our Obamacare future.

I'm reading this ARthur C. Brooks op-ed in The Wall Street Journal here and this sentence jumped out at me in the second paragraph, "The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that the national debt will balloon to $17.1 trillion by 2019."

Holy Cow!

We, The Taxpayers, will be $17,100,000,000 in debt (probably mostly to China) in ten (10!) years under Obama.

WTF?

Stopping this madness must start now. No to cap and tax! No to Obamacare! No to bailouts and "stimulus" bills. No. No. No.

There are many options out there to solve our problems that DO NOT require the raising of taxes and the deepening of our debt.

Indeed, many solutions would lower our taxes and reduce our debt if only liberals would take their eyes off their utopian thesis papers and take a real look at the real world the rest of us inhabit.

H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even more commonly known as the Stimulus Bill and aptly dubbed the Porkulus Bill) contains a whopping $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is the brain child of former Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee Tom Daschle. Before the Porkulus Bill passed, Betsy McCaughey, former Lieutenant governor of New York, wrote in detail about the Council's purpose.

Daschle's stated purpose (and therefore President Obama's purpose) for creating the Council is to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make the hard decisions about health care rationing that elected politicians are politically unable to make. The end result is to slow costly medical advancement and consumption. Daschle argues that Americans ought to be more like Europeans who passively accept "hopeless diagnoses."

What ought to frighten the daylights out of everyone is how Obamacare lays the groundwork for what Mark Steyn calls the "Big Government ratchet." As Ashby elaborates:

What may pass as a 1,000 page health care law will explode into perhaps many thousands of pages of regulatory codes. The deliberate vagueness will give regulators tremendous leverage to interpret its provisions. Thus Obama's Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein will play a major role in defining the government's role in controlling medical care.

How does Sunstein approach end of life care? In 2003 he wrote a paper for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies arguing that human life varies in value. Specifically he champions statistical methods that give preference to what the government rates as "quality-adjusted life years." Meaning, the government decides whether a person's life is worth living. If the government decides the life is not worth living, it is the individual's duty to die to free up welfare payments for the young and productive.

Not to rehash our discussion here about the proper definition of a death panel, but, again, I think saying the government will be "deciding whether a person's life is worth living" is about more than "cut[ting] off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure" — the narrow definition of death panels used by the New York Times (as Ashby recounts). It's about foreclosing care to the treatable — based on some government formula — such that they wither and die before their time. For all these years, the Left has told us we must butt out of end-of-life decisions because they are so intensely personal; turns out they're only intensely personal if you're decision is to die — if you want to live, that's up to the bureaucrats.

Below is a photo of a wreck in Jefferson Parish, LA (near New Orleans ) between two trucks and a Smart Car. Think I'll pass on the Smart Car. I don't think they will need the ambulance!

UPDATE: My husband informs me that the above is NOT a SmartCar wreck and gave me this link to share with you. Neither of us, however, would ever purchase a SmartCar or recommend that anyone else does either.

MASSA: I will vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I am doing is going to be helpful.

(inaudible participants' comments regarding the "interests" of the district statement from Mr. Massa)

Massa: I will vote against their opinion if I actually believe it will help them.

Can't believe a United States Representative would say outright that he would vote against the will of his constituents? Watch below or visit this Washington Times site, here.

Seriously, what part of representative did you not understand. We, The People, own you. You do not exsist as a professional politician without our consent. You can not remain in office if you alienate the will of The People.

So I say again, Goodbye Rep. Massa. You are not long for your district.

Hardly anyone talks much about the faith-based initiative begun by President George W. Bush and expanded by President Obama. And there was hardly a murmur about Obama's appointee to head the program, the Rev. Joshua DuBois, a 27-year-old Pentecostal preacher.

A comparison of how the media have treated the two presidents and their faith-based programs during the first six months of their administrations (2001 and 2009) is the subject of a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The above is from Kathleen Parker's piece in The Washington Post (here) comparing how the media have treated George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives against Obama's expansion and deeper funding of the exact same program.

The nominee, David Michaels, is rabidly opposed to the industrial chemical BPA, about which Mark Hemingway wrote recently. It should be noted that, as a recent STATS analysis found, BPA isn’t anywhere near the problem junk-science advocates make it out to be. Expect an all-out blitz against BPA from OSHA at some point, and expect silence from the “war on science” guys even as the battle rages.

The White House is passing the blame for unsolicited emails from the White House on a "third-party". Part of the statement they issued according to FoxNews here is...

"The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House Web site. The White House doesn't purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all e-mails come from the White House Web site as we have no interest in e-mailing anyone who does not want to receive an e-mail," the statement said. "If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the e-mail, we hope they were not too inconvenienced."

[Emphasis mine]

The White House may not have purchased, uploaded or merged their email list from any other list, etc., etc., but no where to they say the White House did NOT forward their email list or sell their email list to a third-party.

So, we shouldn’t let up just yet. Government-run health care isn’t dead until it’s shot, stabbed, beaten, burned, with the ashes mixed in goat blood and fed to Ted Kennedy and John Dingell, and the whole thing videoed and posted on YouTube.

If you want to know what's going on with Obamacare (and you don't believe the White House is serious about dropping the public option given the fury the liberals are spewing right now), then you should read these posts.

The Press-Enterprise has a post up titled "Private perks?" about the need for real, toothy oversight of Congress and their "ethics".

The ethics committee's decision was an indictment of the rules, not an exoneration of Dodd and Conrad. And while adding a mortgage disclosure rule would not end official corruption, it would help the public answer the first question in any legislative analysis: Who benefits?

"Who benefits?" is an excellent question to ask your Congressional Representative when they talk about Obamacare and never mention that they and other federal employees will be exempt from Obamacare in both the Senate and House versions.

I'll let someone else fisk the crap in this op-ed from the New York Times by Obama.

But seriously, if you have to put all this effort into "convincing" Americans and its still not working, you're either incapable of leading, have a bad idea to begin with or (my inclination) both.

Oh I can't resist...

Second, reform will finally bring skyrocketing health care costs under control, which will mean real savings for families, businesses and our government. We’ll cut hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies that do nothing to improve care and everything to improve their profits.

Really?

How will it bring down the "skyrocketing costs" if you can't bring down the skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Medicaid?

Why can't you cut the billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid first to PROVE you can do it with a whole new government bureaucracy that is going to cost billions of dollars to set up in the first place?

Why do we need a new government bureaucracy?

Why not simply expand the existing government programs to include more income groups?

And what are the "unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies"?

What about the unwarranted farm, sugar, and alternative energy subsidies?

Why not get rid of those to free up discretionary funding for a genuine overhaul of Medicare and Medicaid.

While not a real fisking per se, I think having seven questions immediately pop into mind from one paragraph of this pathetic "believe me" pleading from Obama is a fairly obvious sign that my second statement of this post is fairly accurate.